There is admirable beauty in the knowledge of details and in the efficient procedure with which one carries out an action, especially when it concerns a world on the fringes, but one that is not too distant or absolved from "normal" "moral" behavior. It is of such an interest that director Michael Mann asserts to the surface in his films, with his attraction to the professional nature of an individual carrying out a particular craft and navigating through their own area of expertise. It is then sublimely poetic how Mann crafts his films, with the same commanding grasp of his own personal vocation that his characters do of their own work onscreen.

In Collateral, Mann’s new film, he does just that. He takes the simple tale of a professional killer (Tom Cruise with grey hair, wearing a grey suit; even the mini-billboard advertisement on top of the cab is for Bacardi Silver (that is shown more than once and in a curious manner), all of which seem to hint at the "grey zone" that Cruise’s morally flexible character exists in) hijacking a daydreaming cabbie (Jamie Foxx, who was also in Mann’s Ali (2001), in a surprisingly good, subdued, serious performance; his moments of goofiness here only serve to remind us that he is out of his element and justify fear and reluctance in his actions later on.) and forcing him to be his impromptu, unwilling personal driver to the string of hits that he has to perform that night (which in the hands of someone lesser would probably have been a bland, commercial "thriller" sprinkled with banal one-liners and poor attempts at situational relief humor) into a present aware, ethnic irrelevant, visually dazzling visceral portrait of impersonalization and a bleak, existential, misanthropic tale of innocence and indifference.

We are almost seduced by Cruise’s character’s vocal self justification, his cool confidence, and hypnotic indifference that allow him to violently and blatantly kill people in the open public, or anywhere he needs to, while admitting that whereas most people can know where and what they will be doing 10 years from now, they don’t know what they will be doing 10 minutes from now. It is a luring, exotic, intriguing line of thought that only total indifference could provide a reality for. This is what makes Cruise’s character Vincent totally fascinating and what narratively carries the film on a manic, spontaneous high.

Jamie Foxx’s character is more archetypal and it is he who vicariously lives out the immediate danger of an unfortunate situation. Perhaps most average moviegoers will only take away a "story" of a man thrust into viscous circumstances just trying to stay alive, and will derive most involvement waiting to see if he will survive. This line of narrow narrative experience, I believe is missing a whole ocean of profundities and fascinating beauty of Mann’s visual, symmetrical cinema.

Mann’s visual vision, as with most great filmmakers, is usually co-conspired by majestic cinematographers. Dante Spinotti has shot most of Mann’s films, and his work with Mann on The Insider (1999) is one of the landmark achievements in cinematography of the last decade, that has influenced everything down to the framing of products in commercials. Mann has also worked with such greats as the legendary Alex Thomson (on The Keep (1983)), who worked under Nicolas Roeg when he was a cinematographer, and who used his lush, dreamy fantasy atmosphere on John Boorman’s Excalibur (1981), Nicolas Roeg’s Eureka (1984) and Track 29 (1988) (written by the late, great Dennis Potter) Ridley Scott’s Legend (1985), and Jim Henson’s Labyrinth (1986). Emmanuel Lubezki who brought us the spooky, ghostworld ash snowglobe look of Tim Burton’s Sleepy Hollow (1999) and the vibrant green dark glow of Alfonso Cuaron’s Great Expectations (1998), and who is currently shooting Terrence Malick’s upcoming The New World (2005), shot Mann’s last film; Ali (2001). On Collateral, Mann worked with two different cinematographers; Dion Beebe and Paul Cameron. Beebe has shot many Austrialian films, a few for Jane Campion, most recently Campion’s In The Cut (2003). Cameron has filmed a few glossy action films for Dominic Sena and has last shot Man On Fire (2004) with Tony Scott. Both are young but accomplished DPs and their work on Collateral with Mann proves they have the eyes for it.

Visual beauty is an indisputable in the cinema of Michael Mann. For after all, film at its most basic element is 24 different still photographs a second. The greatest filmmakers, in my opinion, realize this and do not regard cinema as simply a storytelling, narrative medium. Film by definition is a medium composed of images and these images do not necessarily have to manifest themselves in some sort of narrative form, that is simply just what, over time and money, has become the dominate commercial use of it. But the greatest film artists know true cinema at its core is pure images. They use the commercial narrative form to subvert to the beauty and power of the image. Michael Mann knows this and every frame of his films are carefully and meticulously set up with precision, depth and balance as objects, light, shadows, colors, movement and people are all filmed pure with some sort of cosmic symmetry. Shots flow with a fluidity and grace into one another and the camera becomes an angel over the shoulder of time.

With Collateral, Mann has chosen to forego celluloid and shoot the film with a high definition digital camera. This is a first for Mann and one might be inclined to be a little disappointed at this news given Mann’s usual use of photographic beauty, but take heart, the film is just as visually dazzling as ever. He has managed to take a form, video, that is not usually regarded for its visual aesthetics and use it in such a way as to transcend its limitations thru its strengths. The lights of the city become a whole ocean of tiny artificial stars that the characters traverse across like a derelict ship floating thru a vast impersonal universe. He uses shaky close-ups, blurry surroundings, shifting focus lenses, hidden camera-like POV shots, interior dimensions, airy space, flaring lights; all with a masterful grace. For example: there is a translucent sticker stuck to the clear plastic separating wall between the front seat and the back seat of the cab that Jamie Foxx’s character drives. Mann continually, throughout the film, uses this sticker, with the camera lense, to diffuse our view of the cab’s backseat passengers and one might say, with a large degree of interpretive banal semantics, each character’s hidden, incommunicable internal world, but most likly used mainly for its contrasting asthetic interest. It is always out of focus, blocking and fuzzing our glimpse of the entire surface of each passenger’s, chiefly Jada Pinkett-Smith and Tom Crusie’s characters’, physical identity; covering up their chin, or mouth, or cheek, or forehead. This is only one example of how Mann sabotages the hazy gloss of video to his advantage.

Generally speaking, the prevailing look of video has become since its invention, due to its useful practicality and low cost accessibility, engrained in our collective mind’s eye as something altogether familiar; local news, actualities, home videos, etc. This perception takes on a very surreal nature when we see it used inside of a fictional narrative film, especially one that seems far removed from our universe by the inclusion of pop culture iconography, namely in the faces, and bodily gestures, of "famous movie stars", whose countenances we are conditioned to seeing rendered in the obscure visual delicacy of intermittent motion picture film stock, of which has obtained its own grace do to the fact that small fragments of time are lost inbetween the intermittently photographed frames whereas with video it is a constant digital stream. That is why movement seems more awkward and familiarly "realistic" with video. It is then abstractly uncanny when we witness such objects of nebulously perceived stature moving thru scenes that resemble in look something we might have shot with our department store bought camcorders, and something that more closely resembles our own optical view of the movement around us. (For Example: A scene in which Tom Cruise’s character throws a chair thru a window and falls on down as he tries to jump over it resembles a blooper from a hidden camera show and seems oddly out of place but works fascinatingly at the same time.) All of this is even more so complexly compounded in Collateral when it suddenly erupts into stark, disturbing acts of violence that are rendered in a immediatly familiar looking way with a system that more closely parallels our own sight.

The screenplay was written by Stuart Beattie, a writer with a small handful of produced scripts that include; the 1997 PG rated kangaroo "family" film Joey, an Australian drama/comedy, Kick (1999), about a rugby player who really wants to be a ballet dancer, and a "B" action movie called Body Armor (1997), starring Ron Perlman and Clint Howard, that was directed by long time stuntman Jack Gill. (They would all make for an quite interesting quadruple feature with Collateral) This is also a departure for Mann, as he usually does his own writing, sometimes with partners, mostly based on other material, and it makes one wonder at how much, if any, change he made to the script (although one can tell on several different instances involving dialogue, situations, etc. that, that section of the script anyway, does not feel like it came from Michael Mann). But for all intensive purposes Beattie gets the screen credit and the script is probably mostly his, though the guilds are known for their sticky rules, and his dialogue, is at times sharp, inductive and ambiguous. The screenplay taken by itself though could have not to difficultly lent itself into have becoming a far inferior beast in the hands of a director more commercially, and less imaginatively minded. So, we might have to wait and see what Beattie produces in the future in order to more accurately divide up credit.

The ending of the film, which at first seems hopeful, is really quite hopeless as one thinks about what might realistically happen to the survivors, past the end credits, given their involvement with the night’s proceedings. I am also gratefully pleased that in the final scene Mann did not give into cheap irony, as many other commercial filmmakers might have done, and show the surviving characters hail a cab, in order to begin their journey into their changed lives. Instead they stagger to the street corner, huddled and scared and we then see a robotic subway train, like an impersonal, inanimate coffin, moving on into the distance along its routine track, oblivious to events, time or its lifeless cargo, which now means no more than one of its metal wheels or plastic seats. This is a felicitous final image to fascinating, intelligent, dark and beautiful, thought birthing cinema.

(Mann and Cruise must have got along while filming as they already have another film scheduled together called The Few (2005), which is supposedly based on the true story of American pilot Billy Fiske, who in the early days of WWII ignored America’s neutrality rules and flew against the Germans. It won’t be the first time Mann has dealt with Nazis; see his 1983 atmospheric horror classic The Keep, so far his only cinematic experiment with "non-realism" or fantasy.)

                                                                 © THE FILM JOURNAL 2004